Quote Originally Posted by Tahli View Post
I'm biased towards the Black Shroud and don't think it gets enough attention in the MSQ, so I think it'd be neat if underneath the Shroud, as an extension of Gelmorra, there is a whole country-sized subterranean biome similar to D&D's Underdark. It could also give some focus on Duskwight which are rarely referenced in the game.

Could also be connected to the abyss seen across the lands. In the Lancer quests, the npc Foulques falls into the North Shroud's abyss, and can be later seen as a random undead encounter in the Palace of the Dead.
I'd enjoy an expansion about going back to look deeper at a part of the world we've already been, and if we're ever doing that, 'the underside of the Shroud' is maybe the very first place we should go. But I think it'd require a fundamentally entirely different approach to how FFXIV currently does expansions; I don't think that quite makes sense in the current form of expansions we have.

Like, to just start with a dumb thought exercise that my Discord server stumbled into at one point: I think that a well-rounded FFXIV expansion should have all five Magic the Gathering land types in their zone lineup. There should be a Plains, Mountain, Island, Swamp and Forest somewhere in there as a primary defining element of a zone, just to ensure that you have a lot of aesthetic diversity. My concern with something like a 'Gelmorra Expansion' is that you're not gonna be able to hit all of those, and the expansion suffers because of it.